Cutting prisoners' privileges will add to the pressures in jail

While it is extremely desirable to reduce high levels of reoffending by former prisoners through making incarceration a period of rehabilitation through an active engagement in education/training, I feel something serious is missing from this policy rhetoric (Grayling cracks down on prison privileges, 30 April). Most prisoners come from areas of multiple deprivation and their associations with authority, especially schools, have led to many suffering exclusion. The reforms are designed to compel prisoners out of their cells into activities deemed to be relevant to rehabilitation. Failure to participate will mean they will no longer enjoy the basic privileges they have become used to during their sentence.

An unintended, but easily foreseeable, consequence of this regime will be the enormous pressure exerted upon prison officers, whose relations with the inmates may alter radically. School staff know only too well how stressful it is dealing with challenging behaviour from students. Time will tell whether the culture of incarceration produced is sustainable and what effects it will impose on staff-prisoner human relations. Up until now academic research has found such relations play a critically important role in managing the mental wellbeing of the prison population. Professor Chris HolliganUniversity of the West of Scotland

• So access to the gym is now to be a privilege. Never mind that for many it is an opportunity to develop their health and strength, diminished by years of neglect and self-neglect. For some, especially women, prison is the one stable point in their lives and prison staff the most empathic reference points; prison PE instructors stand high in that list. Access to the gym is itself often a step towards self-knowledge and rehabilitation. Many prisoners have told me during my 15 years ministering in prisons that it was the gym and the instructors who gave them a sense of purpose when they might otherwise have self-harmed or attempted suicide.

You have to ask, as well, what meaningful moves towards rehabilitation can be made in a short sentence of, say, four weeks; people are still being imprisoned for seven or fourteen days, not even long enough to wear their own clothes under Grayling's proposals. At the other end of the scale, what incentives are there for prisoners serving life sentences to prepare for rehabilitation when the system, already shorn of staff and resources, cannot cope with the numbers sent into it? I suspect that this will be another pretext for further creeping privatisation.Rev Peter PhillipsCardiff University

• The Inspectorate of Constabulary, HMIC, is one of the few brand names that survives the great policing shake-up (Editorial, 30 April), but it is too remote from the architecture of the new landscape. Tom Winsor needs to bring it out in the open. If given the necessary resources, it could take on new functions such as maintaining the register of chief constables' interests and possibly even the central register of police commissioners' interests the home affairs committee is compiling. It could also act as independent oversight on investigations of national importance. This would put an end to the "double-hatting" chief constables are having to undertake alongside their day jobs, leading operations such as Pallial (into north Wales child abuse) and Herne (into undercover police officers).Keith Vaz MPChairman, home affairs committee